Detroit Pistons 1988-1989 NBA Champions: Motor City Madness

Never ones to skimp on providing value for money, Beyond Home Entertainment have outdone themselves with Motor City Madness - looking around my DVD collection, which has been described as ‘ridiculously excessive’ by more than one ardent female admirer, I’m hard-pressed to find too many other box sets with a running time of over 22 hours. 

An absolute must for basketball fans of any persuasion, this sprawling 11-disc collections brings together no less than 10 complete games from the NBA’s Golden Age.  Included in their entirety are all six 1989 Eastern Conference Finals matchups between the Pistons and the Chicago Bulls, and all four games of Detroit’s convincing Championship sweep against the Lakers that same year.  This is probably the eighth or ninth BHE basketball collection I’ve owned, and along with the stunning Ultimate Jordan and Chicago Bulls: The 1990s box sets it stands as one of the pinnacles of Beyond’s hugely impressive line of NBA releases. 

As a Bulls fan I found the Eastern Conference Finals were a particular treat: struggling to overcome the impenetrable Piston defence, Jordan played some of the most impressive and creative offense of his career, but at this stage his supporting cast, which included John Paxton and a nascent Scotty Pippen, were simply unable to complement him to the extent required.  It would be a different story in the mid-1990s when Chicago would win no less than six championships in eight years, but in 1989 the Isiah Thomas-led Pistons were on the road to Championship glory and nothing was going to stand in their way, least of all Magic Johnson’s LA Lakers. 

After the gritty six-game outing against the Bulls the Championship series itself was almost a letdown; unless, that is, you’re a Pistons fan.  Quite simply Detroit never let the injury-plagued Lakers into the series, building to a superb crescendo in Game 4 which saw series MVP Joe Dumars lead his team to victory in spite of a valiant 40-point effort from Laker forward James Worthy.  (Game 4 also has the distinction of being the final game of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who retired after 20 seasons in the NBA following the 1988-1989 season). 

In addition to the above 10 games Motor City Madness also includes an excellent hour-long season wrap up.  This ‘Championship recap,’ to use the box cover’s terminology, provides a far-ranging overview of the entire season, including plenty of exciting footage from regular and post-season matches and an incisive look at each Finals game in turn, and serves as a perfect introduction to one of the most memorable sporting collections ever to be released in this country. 

Audio & Video

As may be expected when dealing with source material of this age, audio and video quality is far from pristine, at least by modern standards.  The long shots in particular are quite grainy (say a 4/10 for clarity), though close ups show much better definition (around (6.5/10 or so).  Each of the games are perfectly watchable, however - it’s just something to be aware of.  On the sound front the DD 2.0 audio is mostly fine, and I only noticed a couple of very brief periods of audio drop-out during the games that I watched.